Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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25 April 2008

Virtual course and blog: Government 2.0

Technology, societal changes and new management practices influence how we perceive the roles of government. Moreover, they may transform how government does business and creates public value. However, we might as well fall into the trap of technological determinism--moving from eGovernment straight to Government X.0 hype. Therefore, many predicted a significant transformation of government thanks to new technologies such as ICT, in particular, the Internet while current research shows that the transformation has not happened (e.g. work by West, Norris, Fountain or Lazer). eDemocracy also remains a rethorical promise (Mahrer/Krimmer; UN).

In any case, while I am still working on my contribution to the discourse on Web 2.0 & Government, I have two recommendations for any of our readers interested in the matter:

First, Philipp Mueller, who has already contributed some guest entries to this blog, is offering a course on "Government 2.0" for master students at Erfurt University's School of Public Policy (ESPP) (Spring term 2008). The course covers various aspects such as Web 2.0, open source, NPM, PPP, citizen-centric governance or performance management. The sessions can be viewed online or downloaded as an mp3 file.

Second, a blog by David Osimo, a researcher at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre IPTS, who is working on the impact of Web 2.0 on public services.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)

22 April 2008

MOMA: Design and the Elastic Mind

An amazing show at the Museum of Modern Art, in NYC --- Design and the Elastic Mind.

Many of the "exhibits" are network representations (including a few that I use in elementary lectures on network science). And the website showing them (since the exhibits are all digital) is amazing.

Check it out: Design and the Elastic Mind .

Posted by Stan Wasserman at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

21 April 2008

International Meeting on Methodology for Empirical Research on Social Interactions, Social Networks, and Health

I was pleased to be invited to the:

International Meeting on Methodology for Empirical Research on Social Interactions, Social Networks, and Health

which will be held early in May in Cambridge. It's being organized by Chuck Manski and Nicholas Christakis, and hosted by The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard.

Objective: To bring together econometricians, social statisticians and social network analysts to improve research on the relationship between social interactions and healthy.

Speakers and topics:

Opening Remarks, Charles Manski, Northwestern University

"Social Contagion in Health Behaviors in Current and Future Longitudinally Resolved Social Network Datasets" Nicholas Christakis, Harvard University

"Stochastic Blockmodels for Networks with Mixed Membership and Challenges for Modeling Dynamically Evolving Networks" Steve Fienberg, Carnegie Mellon University

"Social Interactions from the Perspective of Economics" Steven Durlauf, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"New Models for Dynamic Analysis of Multi-Sided (Large Scale) Conflict" Peter Bearman, Columbia University

"Human Dynamics: From Priorities to Human Travel Patterns" Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University

"Superspreaders or Limited Access Highways? Explaining Generalized Epidemics and Prevalence Disparities in HIV" Martina Morris, University of Washington

"Separating Social Influence from Social Selection on the Basis of Longitudinal Data and Statistical Models" Tom Snijders, University of Oxford

"Longitudinal Model of Network Formation: Heider's Theory of Balance vs. Simmel's Triadic Formation", Mark Handcock, University of Washington

"Network Topology and its Implications for Model-Building" Pip Pattison, University of Melbourne

"Selection and Influence: Models for Individual Attributes and Social Network Structures" Garry Robins, University of Melbourne

"The Average Outcome and Inequality Implications of Segregation in the Presence of Social Spillovers " Bryan Graham, University of California, Berkeley

"Point Process Estimation of Large-scale Spatial Dependencies", Matthew Harding, Stanford University

Closing remarks, Nicholas Christakis, Harvard University

Contact Info:

Gabrielle Stone, IQSS Events Coordinator

tel: 617-495-9489

Posted by Stan Wasserman at 3:21 PM | Comments (1)

9 April 2008

From the Bottom-up: Building the 21st Century CIA

For anyone who attended the talk today on Intellipedia by Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, you can post reactions on the blog....

"From the Bottom-up: Building the 21st Century CIA"

Sean Dennehy
Chief of the CIA Intellipedia Development Cell

Don Burke
Intellipedia Doyen

Abstract: In this seminar, Sean Dennehy and Don Burke will brief the technical and cultural changes underway at the CIA involving the adoption of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking tools. These tools are being used to improve information sharing across the US Intelligence Community by moving information out of traditional channels. Sean and Don will also host a question and answer session. In 2005, Dr. Calvin Andrus published “The Wiki and The Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” Three years later, a vibrant and rapidly growing community has transformed how the CIA aggregates, communicates, and organizes intelligence information.

Sean Dennehy has more than 15 years of experience in various elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, DIA’s Joint Staff Intelligence, and supporting US Air Force operations. As the pilot customer for Intellipedia, he has become a leading change agent for incorporating Enterprise 2.0 solutions into the Intelligence Community's business practices. He has developed an innovative “sabbatical” program that introduces Intelligence Community officers to the numerous web 2.0 applications that are being deployed on multiple intelligence networks. The focus of his efforts is encouraging a viral adoption where officers replace existing processes to take advantage of network effects encountered when individuals move projects out of “channels” and onto “platforms”. His actions are based on the National Intelligence Strategy’s six main characteristics: results-focused, collaborative, bold, future-oriented, self-evaluating, and innovative. Together with a small cadre of early adopters, Mr. Dennehy is helping to break down stovepipes to allow intelligence professionals to truly act as a "community”.

Don Burke is a leading proponent of the Enterprise 2.0 ethos within the Intelligence Community and is currently the "Intellipedia Doyen", which is a role he has held since the spring of 2006. In this role he is partnered with other early adopters in an effort to demonstrate the value of social software tools, educate the Community on how to use these tools, and advocate for improvements to the environment with the goal of improving our ability to capture our knowledge and expertise. Mr. Burke is currently employed by the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and has a diverse 19+ year background in the Federal Government working a wide range of technical and analytical issues including collection, technical analysis, congressionally directed actions, direct support to operations, project management, advanced visualization technologies, software development, budgeting, and management. Mr. Burke was quoted extensively in the October 2007 SIGNAL magazine article "Intellipedia Seeks Ultimate Information Sharing."

Relevant Readings:

1. NY Times Article (good for general introduction to IC cultural and technological issues)
URL:
2. 2004 - Seminal Paper about why the IC needs to adopt social software technologies
Title: The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community
3. Wikipedia article on "Intellipedia"

_____________________

Posted by David Lazer at 2:10 PM | Comments (1)

Think Facebooking is a waste of time? Think again...

This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.

The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 9:57 AM | Comments (0)

7 April 2008

The Virginia Tech Symposium on Enhancing Resilience To Catastrophic Events Through Communicative Planning

Of potential interest to readers of this blog:

The Virginia Tech Symposium on Enhancing Resilience To Catastrophic Events Through Communicative Planning

Introduction

The Institute for Policy and Governance and the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech invite scholars to consider how collaborative planning can enhance resilience to events that threaten to overcome the social and ecological integrity of communities, states, and societies. Presentations and discussion will be held in Blacksburg, VA on November 16-18, 2008, and symposium papers will be edited and revised for journal and/or book publication in early 2009.

Description and Call For Papers

In an essay entitled "The Resilient Community", Virginia Tech Planning Professor Paul Knox (2007) suggested that the widely-admired response of the university to the April 16th 2007 campus shootings was grounded in affective bonds and close-knit social networks that instill community spirit. The bedrock of Virginia Tech’s common identity and shared purpose, Knox suggested, was collaborative interaction that challenges assumptions, stretches the imagination, and develops self-awareness, as students and faculty interact in ways that remake their inner selves, social selves, and professional selves.

Over the past year, planning scholars at Virginia Tech have been considering how collaboration might enhance resilience not only in intentional communities like universities but also within neighborhoods, states, and societies. We wish to extend this arena of scholarly interest and compelling social need by inviting speakers to Blacksburg to consider how collaboration can enhance resilience to disruptions that can occur across a spectrum of time, space, and organizational complexity, from unforeseen violence to disasters like hurricane Katrina to the biospheric catastrophe of rapid anthropogenic climate change.

Resilience is a potent interdisciplinary systems metaphor whose origins lie in the Latin word "resilíre", meaning "to leap back." Hazard planners, security analysts, and others have deployed the term to describe efforts to restore and maintain an optimal stable condition. A more promising approach for our purposes defines resilience as an interactive product of an unsettling event and a social and biophysical system that can exist in multiple stable states, at scales that may encompass communities, states, or societies. These systems may stabilize, change, or collapse when their integrity is compromised by an event that could be rapid and discrete and irreversible like a terrorist attack, gradual and insidious like climate change, or incremental and spatially heterogeneous like a drought. Resilience is the capacity to withstand loss and recover, to weather disturbance without dramatic loss of identity or structural or functional complexity.

We seek to understand how communicative planning can enhance resilience and how resilience thinking can expand the domain of communicative action. Communicative planners have shown how careful listening and interpretation can accommodate differences in styles of speech, forms of knowledge, and styles of reasoning to promote social learning and yield agreements that are both creative and equitable. Communicative planning scholarship has lately joined in defining emergent forms of collaborative governance, and enlarging its scope from stakeholder-based processes to a diversity of collaborative approaches that can bring to life new discursive frameworks and worldviews that over time can shape institutions, such as regional civic roundtables (Innes and Rongerude 2006) and community reconciliation processes (Sandercock 2003).

We invite interested individuals to submit abstracts that respond to three areas of inquiry:

1. What can collaborative processes contribute toward resilience?

Do collaborative processes create or enhance awareness of resilience dynamics, such as the presence of regime change thresholds, or the possibility of transformative alternatives? Papers might explore how collaborative processes promote learning and knowing and the rapid diffusion of ideas and innovations, nurture and reproduce expertise and ways of knowing. Papers may also address other capacities beyond knowledge formation, such as how collaborative processes may contribute to passing a threshold into an alternative regime, or help manage a system to withstand shocks and avoid a threshold. Another approach would be to examine how leaders can enhance collaborative capacity to identify mutual interest, forge common identity, or foster shared sense of purpose and will to act.

2. How can we design and conduct collaborative processes to enhance resilience?

The principal application of stakeholder-based collaborative planning processes has been to resolve otherwise-intractable disputes. Are similar design and process guidelines appropriate to enhance resilience, or does the new objective call for a different design and approach? In addition, papers might examine how, and under what conditions, collaborative processes might be associated with other forms of networked governance in order to maintain system continuity and integrity, or reorganize in response to changing conditions when existing ways of governing become untenable.

3. When and under what circumstances can collaborative processes contribute to resilience?

While it may take years to foster collective identity and action through collaboration, events that threaten to overcome system integrity often cannot be anticipated and opportunities to influence system reorganization may be fleeting. Papers might examine how collaborative processes can be situated to address threats that are be rapid and discrete, as well as those that are gradual, insidious, incremental, potentially irreversible, intergenerational, or spatially heterogeneous. In addition, papers might consider the circumstances in which collaboration can enhance generalized resilience capacity, which is associated with diverse organizational forms and ways of knowing, loose connections between self-organizing units, and unimpeded circulation of feedback throughout a system (Walker and Salt 2006).

Key Dates

Abstract deadline 30 April 2008
Notification of acceptance 15 May 2008
Deadline for full papers 1 October 2008
Symposium 16-18 November 2008
Papers Revised for Publication May 2009 (tentatively)

Abstract Submission

Proposals for papers or posters are to be sent by e-mail to resilience@vt.edu.
The body of the e-mail (no attachments please) should contain:

* Title of the proposed paper
* Abstract of less than 300 words, and
* Complete address and professional affiliation of all (co)-author(s).

The deadline for proposals is 30 April 2008.

Financial Support

Travel cost reimbursement will be provided for symposium participants, as well as local transportation, food, and lodging.

Hosts

* Institute for Policy and Governance, Virginia Tech
* School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Conference Chair

* Bruce Evan Goldstein, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

Advisory Committee

* Max Stephenson, Director, Institute for Policy and Governance, Virginia Tech
* John Randolph, Director, School Policy and International Affairs, Virginia Tech
* R. Bruce Hull, Professor of Forestry, Virginia Tech
* Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor and Senior Fellow for International Advancement, Virginia Tech

Contact

Bruce Evan Goldstein

Urban Affairs and Planning

103 Architecture Annex

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA 24061

Conference E-mail: resilience@vt.edu
Conference Website: : http://www.ipg.vt.edu/resilience.html

References

Innes, Judith and Jane Rongerude. 2006. "Collaborative Regional Initiatives: Civic Entrepreneurs Work to Fill the Governance Gap ." Working Paper 2006-04. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley.

Knox, Paul. 2007. "The Resilient Community." Planning, June issue.

Sandercock, Leonie. 2003. "Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice." Planning Theory and Practice 4(1):11-28.

Walker, Brian and David Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)